Origin of the religious cult

If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share and on account of which we see the door to the religious life once and for all closed to us: it concerns nature and our traffic with nature. In those ages one as yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither earth nor sky are constrained by any compul-sion; a season, sunshine, rain can come or they can fail to come. Any conception of natural causality is altogether lacking. When one rows it is not the rowing which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of which one compels a demon to move the ship. All illness, death itself is the result of magical influences. Becoming ill and dying never occur naturally; the whole conception of a 'natural occurrence' is lacking - it first dawns with the older Greeks, that is to say in a very late phase of mankind, in the conception of a moirat enthroned above the gods. When someone shoots with the bow, there is still an irrational hand and force at work in it; if the wells suddenly dry up, one thinks first of all of subterranean demons and their knavery; it must be the arrow of a god through whose invisible action a man suddenly sinks down. In India according to Lubbock)‡ a carpenter is accustomed to make sacrifices to his hammer, his axe and his other tools; a Brahman treats the crayon with which he writes, a soldier the weapon he employs in the field, a mason his trowel, a labourer his plough in the same way. The whole of nature is in the conception of religious men a sum of actions by conscious and vol-itional beings, a tremendous complex of arbitrarinesses. In regard to everything external to us no conclusion can be drawn that something will be thus or thus, must happen thus or thus; it is we who are the more or less secure and calculable; man is the rule, nature is irregularity - this proposition contains the fundamental conviction which dominates rude, religiously productive primitive cultures. We men of today feel precisely the opposite: the richer a man feels within himself, the more polyphonic his subjectivity is, the more powerfully is he impressed by the uniformity of nature; with Goethe, we all recognize in nature the great means of composure for the modern soul, we listen to the beat of the pendulum of this mightiest of clocks with a longing for rest, for becoming settled and still, as though we could imbibe this uniformity into ourselves and thereby at last come to an enjoyment of ourselves. Formerly the reverse was the case: if we think back to rude, primitive conditions of peoples, or if we look closely at present-day savages, we find them determined in the strongest way by the law, by tradition: the individual is tied to them almost automatically and moved with the regularity of a pendulum. To him, nature - uncomprehended, dreadful, mysterious nature - must seem the domain of freedom, of caprice, of a higher power, indeed, as it were a superhuman stage of existence, a god. But every individual living in such ages and conditions feels how his existence, his happiness, that of the family and the state, the success of any undertaking depends on these arbitrarinesses of nature: certain natural events must occur at the right time, others fail to occur. How can one exercise an influence over these terrible unknown powers, how can one fetter the domain of freedom? thus he asked himself, thus he anxiously seeks: are there then no means of regulating these powers through a tradition and law in just the way you are regulated by them? - The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature - : and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection. The problem these men pose themselves is intimately related to this one: how can the weaker tribe nonetheless dictate laws to the stronger, dispose of it, regulate its actions (so far as they affect the weaker)? One will think first of that mildest kind of constraint, that constraint one exercises when one has gained the affection of someone. It is thus also possible to exercise a constraint on the powers of nature through prayers and pleadings, through submission, through engaging regularly to give presents and offerings, through flattering glorifications, inasmuch as by doing so one obtains their affection: love binds and is bound. Then one can conclude treaties under which both parties commit themselves to a certain course of conduct, pledge securities and exchange oaths. But much more important than this is a species of more violent constraint through magic and sorcery. Just as man is able with the aid of the sorcerer to harm an enemy stronger than himself, just as the sorcery of love can operate at a distance, so the weaker man believes he can influence the mightier spirits of nature too. The chief means employed by all sorcery is that of getting into one's power something belonging to another: hair, nail, food from his table, even his picture or his name. Thus equipped one can then practise sorcery; for the basic presupposition is that to everything spiritual there pertains something corporeal; with its aid one is able to bind, harm, destroy the spirit; the corporeal provides the handle with which one can grasp the spiritual. So that, as man thus influences other men, so he also influences some spirit of nature; for the latter too has its corporeal aspect by which it can be grasped. The tree and, compared with it, the seed from which it originated - this enigmatic juxtaposition seems to demonstrate that one and the same spirit has incorporated itself in both forms, one small, one big. A stone that suddenly rolls away is the body in which a spirit is active; if a rock lies on a lonely heath and it seems impossible that human strength could ever have sufficed to take it there, it must have moved there itself, that is to say it must harbour a spirit. Everything that has a body is accessible to sorcery, thus the spirits of nature are so too. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900